Here’s a summary: At one time, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) tested TIA (Total Information Awareness), a project that vacuumed up all available information about citzens of the U.S. and other countries: birth records, credit reports, school transcripts, utility bills, driving records, car-rental receipts and so on. It then collated this data and plotted nonobvious connections between people, hopefully spotlighting potential terrorists.

Conspiracy Theories

Knowledge of TIA leaked to the press in February 2003, prompting fears of a dawning police state. Renaming the program Terrorism Information Awareness did not save TIA from having its funding quickly eliminated.

Many observers maintained that the intelligence community wouldn’t just give up on such a valuable program. Enter Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, which was launched in February 2004. Some of Facebook’s earliest funding came from Peter Thiel, an entrepreneur who became wealthy through the creation and sale of PayPal.

Conspiracy theorists associate Thiel with intelligence-community figures such as Gilman Louie, former CEO of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture-capital shop, and Dr. Anita Jones, who used to oversee DARPA. They also link Louie and Jones, somewhat tenuously, with James Breyer of Accel Partners, which raised $12.7 million for Facebook.

Pretty scary stuff, if you’re into guilt by association: Facebook, which at its heart is an information-gathering enterprise, may have been backed by people who are interested in gathering information.

From there it’s just a stone’s throw to a Facebook-as-TIA-replacement scenario. Better yet, Facebook requires no congressional funding or oversight, and millions of people are cheerfully inputting their favorite songs, schedules, photos, sexual orientation and more into the site as you read this.

But the conspiratorial line of thinking ignores important differences between Facebook and TIA.

Digital Trail

The strength of TIA was that it collected information from the trails people unavoidably leave as consumers and citizens, using it to develop a deep profile of you and your personal network. You probably wouldn’t know about this profile, and you certainly couldn’t affect its contents.

But Facebook is only as powerful as the information people voluntarily add to it. If you’re worried about privacy, don’t create a profile on Facebook, and if you must have one, omit any aspects of your life and actions that you don’t want others — many others — to know about. Like your associations with known terrorists.

Also, Peter Thiel is an avowed libertarian, making him unlikely to support using Facebook as a government surveillance tool. And investing in Facebook doesn’t impart the ability to funnel its information to some police state; that still takes a court order which — granted — intelligence-community agencies could acquire easily enough, at least in individual cases.

What’s more interesting than the Facebook-as-TIA conspiracy is the intelligence community's recognizing Facebook’s social-networking power and emulating it.

Secret Society

In December 2006, ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence), which oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies — including the CIA, the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), the NSA (National Security Agency) and so on — will debut a social network for its analysts called A-Space. It will include a Web browser-based overlay on those agencies’ communication systems, allowing them to email, blog, tag, instant message and create RSS feeds across agency firewalls for the first time.

A-Space will complement Intellipedia, a wiki for intelligence professionals that should further aid interagency intelligence-community collaboration and perhaps begin to dismantleinformation “stovepipes,” the closed nature of which aided the 9/11 attackers.

Not everyone in the intelligence community is happy about the ODNI’s moves toward greater information-sharing, because that sharing creates counterintelligence risks. But the intelligence community is building its own Web 2.0 tools, and making them work is probably more important than discovering whether you are addicted to Lindsay Lohan.

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